Lightweighting Aircraft Bracket Design: How Potez Aéronautique Achieved Major Weight Savings
One of the most effective strategies is structural lightweighting—removing unnecessary material while maintaining strength and safety. However, conventional CAD tools often fall short, leading to design limitations, inefficiencies, and costly iterations. Thus, Cognitive Design serves as a powerful enabler, helping to overcome these challenges by unlocking new possibilities in optimization and manufacturability.
In collaboration with Potez Aéronautique, a leading aerostructure supplier, we leveraged Cognitive Design's capabilities to optimize a critical aircraft structural bracket. By integrating topology optimization workflow, Simulation-Driven Design, and Manufacturing-Driven Design within a single parametric workflow, the team achieved a 30% weight reduction while maintaining full structural compliance under aeronautical load cases. The production-ready geometry was delivered in under 4 days, compared to the 3-week baseline for conventional CAD-based iterations.
Results
- 30% weight reduction vs. legacy machined baseline
- Full structural compliance validated under aeronautical load cases
- Production-ready geometry in under 4 days vs. 3-week baseline
- Additive Manufacturing and CNC routes evaluated in a single workflow
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Using Cognitive Design's integrated topology optimization and simulation-driven design workflow, Potez Aéronautique achieved a 30% mass reduction compared to an optimized bracket designed for CNC machining, alongside an 8% stress reduction after topology optimization. The full design exploration and manufacturability validation was completed in 28 hours, three times faster than equivalent traditional CAD methods.
Manufacturing-Driven Design in Cognitive Design embeds process-specific constraints directly into the optimization loop from the first iteration, ensuring every generated concept is manufacturable. For aerostructure suppliers like Potez Aéronautique, this eliminates late-stage manufacturability surprises that typically require redesign, supplier rework, and program delays under EASA certification frameworks.
Combining topology optimization with simulation-driven design allows engineers to first generate an optimal material layout, then refine material distribution using stress analysis inputs to further reduce mass while maintaining structural performance. This two-phase approach, fully integrated in Cognitive Design, outperforms running topology optimization alone, particularly for aircraft structural brackets with complex multi-axial load cases.
Yes. Cognitive Design's Design Explorer logs every design iteration and its associated performance metrics, including mass, stress, safety factor, cost, and manufacturability score, throughout the exploration, creating a full traceable record of the design decision process. This audit trail is directly relevant for aerospace suppliers operating under EASA and FAA design assurance frameworks that require documented engineering rationale for design choices.
The full design exploration and manufacturing validation workflow for an aircraft structural bracket was completed in 28 hours with Cognitive Design, three times faster than equivalent traditional CAD methods. This compression includes topology optimization, simulation-driven refinement, manufacturing feasibility validation, and back-to-CAD operations, all within a single integrated environment.
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